Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter

by Michael Reaves

  Which was fortunate, because after the effort of climbing the long silken rope to the top of the underground chasm, the two humans were exhausted. But they couldn’t afford to rest, or even slow down. They had to assume that the Sith was still somewhere behind them, still pursuing them.

  Which was the worst of their problems, but by no means the only one. Lorn figured that in all likelihood the bank’s security personnel were after him and I-Five by now, as well. The transaction fraud they had committed would probably have also attracted the notice of the planetary police, and very possibly a few Republic treasury agents.

  It had also occurred to Lorn that Black Sun might have a few questions for him, depending on what kind of records Yanth had left of his business dealings and what the eyewitnesses at the Tusken Oasis had pieced together. In short, probably just about every organized power on the planet was looking for him and I-Five.

  Of course, the only pursuit he knew of for certain was the Sith’s. The rest I-Five would probably characterize as paranoia. So what? Lorn told himself. Downlevels, paranoia wasn’t a disorder; it was a lifestyle.

  Darsha spoke. “My people will no doubt have sent out searchers by now. If we can get to a comm station, all we have to do is alert them to come pick us up.”

  Right—the Jedi. He’d forgotten about them. That made one more at the party.

  I-Five said, “We are in an area with very few operating public comm stations. It’s likely there will be a higher quantity of functional ones some levels up.”

  Sharp, Lorn thought. There were stations to be found if you knew where to look, but he didn’t want to give Darsha a chance to drag them back to the Temple just yet. Back there in the tunnels, during the endless search for a way out, he’d managed to whisper a few instructions to the droid without Darsha hearing him. I-Five knew Lorn wanted to get to Tuden Sal as quickly as possible—without the Jedi Padawan.

  “So we’re back to the question of the day: How do we get uplevels?” Darsha asked. “Climbing is risky. I had a bad experience earlier with some hawk-bats. I found my way up a monad, but I don’t see any of those nearby.”

  It was true: Without some kind of transportation, the problem of getting uplevels in this area was a sticky one. Of course, if he could contact Tuden Sal, the man would send a transport—but the problem was circular. First he had to get to a comm station.

  It was extremely frustrating. They had never been more than half a kilometer from one of the most cosmopolitan areas in the galaxy. The only problem was, it was half a kilometer straight up. The possibility of freedom lay only a score of levels over their heads, and yet it might as well be on one of the orbiting space stations for all that they could reach it. All things considered, Lorn thought, it was hard to see how things could get any worse.

  “We are being watched,” the droid said.

  Even as the droid spoke, Darsha could feel them—more than one, of different species, and with unmistakably malign intent.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Lorn said. “Any way to tell exactly who is watching us?”

  Darsha reached out with her senses and felt familiar signatures. She was sure she had come across them before recently.

  “It’s not the Sith,” she said, and saw the broker relax. And then she recognized the vibration in the Force. “It’s—”

  “Hey, lady—still slumming?”

  It was Green Hair, the leader of the Raptor gang that had attacked her when she first touched down in the Corridor. Three of his cronies—the Trandoshan, a Saurin, and a Devaronian—were with him. Darsha almost smiled in relief. Compared to the creatures she’d faced under the surface, these punks were nothing.

  Lorn seemed to feel the same way. He said, “Slide off, boys—we’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

  She could tell from the look on Green Hair’s face that this was not the script he had planned on running. His purported victims were showing no fear. She had to give him credit, though—he tried again, speaking as if he hadn’t heard Lorn.

  “You’re in our territory, and you gotta pay the toll.”

  Darsha almost laughed. It seemed like years ago that she’d been nervous about facing this riffraff. Her perspective had radically changed in the last thirty-six hours. Something of what she felt must have gotten across to the Raptor leader, because he looked worried for a few seconds.

  “I said—” he began.

  Lorn interrupted him. “What you said and what you’re gonna get are two entirely separate things. Listen up—this is how it’s gonna play. You give us your money now—all of you. And you—” He pointed at the leader. “—are taking us on a tour.”

  Green Hair could not have looked more shocked if Lorn had shoved a power prod against his chest. He stood there like a statue for a few moments, his electrostatic hairdo quivering slightly in the low breeze. His mates looked uneasy, as well; this kind of confidence was not something they encountered often on their turf. They glanced at Green Hair, and Darsha did not need the Force to read what was in that look. They were waiting for him to make a decision.

  It was equally obvious that Green Hair knew what was expected of him. He looked back at his crew, then at Darsha, Lorn, and I-Five. “Take ’em!” he shouted, jumping toward Lorn.

  Lorn sidestepped, tripping the youth as he rushed by. I-Five hammered the green head with one metal fist, and the boy went down. The Trandoshan lunged forward, a vibroblade extended. The droid used his finger blaster to heat the vibrating blade to incandescence. With a scream, the Trandoshan dropped the blistering metal and bolted into the shadows, cradling his burned hand with his other one.

  Darsha was deep in the Force, knowing what her attackers were going to do before they did it. It was far easier than facing the taozin. Before she was even aware of reaching for it, the lightsaber was in her grasp, its blade gleaming in the shadows as she deflected the blaster bolts that whizzed from the Devaronian’s weapon toward her and her friends. She thrust out her free hand, and the Saurin’s blaster leapt from his hand toward Lorn, who caught it. He thumbed the setting to stun and fired twice. The remaining two gang members collapsed on the street’s cracked ferrocrete alongside their stunned leader.

  The skirmish had taken no more than a few seconds. Lorn and I-Five began searching the three unconscious bodies.

  “What are you doing?” the Padawan asked.

  “What does it look like?” Lorn replied. “We’re taking from those who don’t need and giving to those who do—namely us. We’ve got to have credits to get uplevels.”

  Darsha started to say something, then thought better of it. She didn’t like scavenging off the bodies, but she could see the necessity.

  Green Hair stirred and moaned. Lorn prodded him with the blaster. “Up,” he said. Green Hair got to his feet, not looking too happy.

  “I’m sure you boys have a way uplevels,” Lorn said to him. “Let’s go find it.”

  Darsha could feel the boy’s resistance. She started to make a hand motion to focus the Force on him and give Lorn’s suggestion a better chance of working, but Lorn held out a palm to her. “No mind tricks, Darsha—I want him alert.”

  She started to say something, then shrugged. He seemed to have a plan, which was more than she had at the moment.

  Lorn prodded the Raptor with his newly acquired blaster. He felt much better now that he had a weapon. True, it wasn’t much—only a BlasTech DH-17, without optical sighting arrays and with its power charge nearly depleted, but it had made a satisfying sizzle when he’d fired it during the short battle. He’d also picked up a vibroblade. These weapons might not help him if the Sith caught up with them, but they were better than facing his nemesis empty-handed.

  There was another reason to celebrate. Since he and I-Five had been the only ones to check the unconscious bodies of the Raptors, Darsha had missed I-Five’s find. The droid had flashed it at Lorn when she had been watching Green Hair. It was a small comlink—no doubt keyed to the Raptor who had owned it, but both Lo
rn and I-Five had hacked comlinks often enough that he knew getting around basic security would be no problem at all.

  The three of them set out, following their unwilling guide, alert for any deception on his part. He led them toward an alley about two hundred meters from the direction he’d come.

  Now if I-Five could just get a few minutes away, or have a chance to socket the comlink into his data plug, he could call Tuden Sal and set up a meeting. Things were looking better and better, Lorn told himself. He and his partner just might be able to get themselves safely offplanet after all.

  Of course, it would mean dropping Darsha—a prospect that, he had to admit, he wasn’t looking forward to nearly as much as he thought he would. After all, she had helped keep him alive through this nightmare. He tried to remind himself that she was doing it purely to get the Neimoidian’s information into the hands of the Jedi—but at this point she knew practically as much as he did. While he might be able to supply some more details, Darsha was as capable of delivering the gist of the data to the Jedi Council as he was.

  Though it galled him to admit it, the truth was that he was growing somewhat fond of her. True, she was younger than he was by a considerable factor, but there was still a certain attractive quality to her.

  Remember, he told himself sternly, she’s a Jedi.

  Or a Padawan, to be pedantic. A Padawan on her first solo mission—that much he’d gleaned from listening to conversations she’d had with I-Five. Tough cut of the cards, Lorn thought, to lose her Master, her mission, and even her informants on the first trip out. Why did she keep going? What made her want to bring them back to the Temple? Couldn’t she see what manipulators the Jedi were?

  Lorn wanted to find out. As they walked, he dropped back a couple of paces until he was alongside her, leaving I-Five to keep tabs on Green Hair.

  “Padawan Assant,” he said, somewhat stiffly, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but—just what made you choose the Jedi path? They’re not—I mean—” He stopped, unsure how to continue. He glanced at her and saw her watching him.

  Even in this dim light, her eyes were so incredibly blue.

  “Never mind,” he said gruffly. He started to walk faster, to bring himself back up to I-Five, but she put her hand on his arm. He looked at it, then at her.

  “I was chosen,” she said. “Chosen by the Force.” She told him that she had never been part of a family. “When the Jedi came and told me I could be a part of theirs, it all made perfect sense.”

  Of course it did, he thought. You weren’t taken from a father who loved you by an order who then fired him because they thought it best that his son have no attachments.

  He felt angry at her answer. He wanted to somehow break that composure, shatter that maddening calm, that sanctimonious righteousness she shared with all the others of her order.

  “But now you might not be able to keep on being a Jedi,” he said. “Doesn’t that make you angry? These people, this order that you consider your family, casting you out?”

  “Do you know of the Jedi Code?”

  Lorn nodded. “Yes. I’ve heard it plenty of times.”

  “ ‘There is no emotion; there is peace,’ ” she quoted. “This doesn’t mean I won’t be upset if I can’t stay at the Temple—just that emotion does not rule me. I am joined with the Force for my entire life. Down there, facing the taozin, I had a chance to really understand what that means.

  “Whether or not I become a Jedi doesn’t matter now. I have felt the balance of the Force at a deeper level, and I know that I have done—and will continue to do—what I can to help maintain that balance. I’ll do it with the Jedi, or on my own—but I will do it. I am at peace, even though I may suffer disappointment.”

  His confusion must have shown on his face, because she smiled. There was a time when a smile like that on the face of a Jedi would have infuriated him, probably would have even made him try to wipe it off with his fists.

  He didn’t feel that way now.

  “Let me put it another way,” Darsha continued. “I have achieved my goals, even if I do not complete my mission.”

  Lorn nodded, but did not reply. It sounded like just the kind of ambiguity all the Jedi Knights were so fond of spouting—but like the smile, it didn’t anger him to hear it coming from her. He wasn’t sure what that meant.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

  Darth Maul stalked the underground passage back the way he had come, his rage boiling into the darkness like superheated steam. His power in the Force was magnified by this; unlike the foolish Jedi, the Sith harnessed the intensity of their emotions, refusing to pretend that such things did not exist. Any creature foolish enough to impede his speedy progress to the surface would be sorry indeed.

  He passed through the Cthons’ cavern and saw no sign of the subterraneans. Doubtless his previous passage through their domain had given them ample cause to make themselves scarce. Which was just as well—though he would have welcomed the opportunity to mow some of them down given the mood he was in, time was of the essence.

  The intensity of his connection to the Force brought back a memory: another day of intense focus of his power. The day he had constructed his lightsaber. Maul was not wont to revisit his past, unless doing so somehow served his master, but the satisfaction of the creation, the perfection of focus, and the highly charged connection to the Force that had wrought his weapon stood out now in his memory.

  The specialized furnace, which he had created from plans taken from his master’s Sith Holocron, had radiated an intense heat as it shaped the synthetic crystals needed for his lightsaber. But rather than leaving the kiln chamber and allowing them to form on their own, he had remained near the device, concentrating on the metamorphosing gems, using the Force to purify and refine the lattice of the molecular matrices.

  Most Jedi used natural crystals in their lightsabers; Adegan crystals were the gems of choice. Most of the other components of a lightsaber were easily obtained—power cells, field energizers, stabilizing rings, flux apertures—but not the crystals themselves. They had to be mined in the Adega system, deep within the Outer Rim Territories. The difficulty of using natural materials meant that the alignment process could take a long time—and the calibration had to be perfect, because mismatched crystals could destroy not only the lightsaber, but its creator. Finding and aligning the crystals was a Jedi test, but it was not the way of the Sith. The dark masters of the Force preferred to create their own synthetic crystals, to match the harmonics in the searing heat of a crucible and thus take their creation of the weapon to a deeper level.

  Maul had sat by the furnace, focusing his hatred of the Jedi to a fiery peak and expanding his control of the Force, which he used to manipulate the molecular structures of the four gems required for his double-bladed weapon. The choice to make two blades instead of one had been an easy one. Only an expert would even think of trying to handle a double-bladed weapon, and he would be no less than an expert. The glory of the Sith required it, as did his master.

  Not even the compressed ferrocrete walls of the pressurized chamber could entirely contain the intense temperature required to form the crystals. Hour after hour had passed, the searing heat washing over the apprentice. But his control had not wavered; the pain had not swayed his focus. Layer after countless layer of the crystals had been laid down, aligned, and perfected. It had taken days, days without food or water or sleep, but eventually he had sensed their readiness. Then he had deactivated the furnace and cracked it open. There, sitting in the formation crucibles, had been his four perfect crystals.

  Maul grinned into the darkness. Yes, it was a good memory, an attainment that reminded him of his powers, that reassured him of his eventual and inevitable triumph. He had been thwarted thus far by an odd chain of events, but that would change soon.

  He was back in the transport tube now. Ahead of him he could see light shining down from overhead, where he’d cut through the ventilation grid. Maul gathered t
he Force to himself and jumped straight up, rising several body lengths to shoot through the opening. A derelict human, deep in the throes of some narcotic delusion, was lying on the street nearby. He saw the Sith rise from the depths, gave out a little gasp, and passed out as Maul’s boots touched the pavement.

  Not far away, the wreckage of the Twi’lek Jedi’s skycar and its attendant debris still partially blocked the streets. The Sith Lord considered how he might best locate his quarry. Once he reacquired their trail he could easily locate them. The weakness of that strategy was that he would still be following them. There had been far too much of that. Much better to get ahead of them somehow and be waiting for them.

  Maul recalled the method by which he’d located the Neimoidian earlier. Perhaps the planetary net cams would be useful to him again; if he could find the most recent location where the humans had been seen, he could save time tracking them by going straight to it.

  But to begin his search he needed a data terminal, and there were none to be found in this urban jungle. He was reminded of something Lord Sidious had once told him: “For every solution there are two problems.”

  Darth Maul considered for a moment, then activated his wrist comm and holoscreen monitor. He commed the Infiltrator, tapped into its main computer, and used that to access the port datalink, bypassing the regular navigation request screens until he located a menu offering access to other networks. His master’s password again opened locked doors, and within a few seconds he had called up several data sources.

  The first was a holomap of this section of the Crimson Corridor. Maul located his current position and tapped in the last known vectors for the humans and the droid.

  The planetary data bank gave him the information he wanted. It was as he had suspected; they were heading in the direction of the Jedi Temple, using the droid’s global positioner to guide them. Fortunately they still had a long way to go, not only toward the Temple, but uplevels, as well. He zeroed down to street level and identified several exits from the subterranean passages that they might have used.